In case you haven’t heard of my latest project, please check it out: TilemapKit.
TilemapKit is now available for sale and works with both Cocos2D-ObjC and Cocos2D-SpriteBuilder.
What is TilemapKit?
In a nutshell, it’s a complete implementation of Tiled’s TMX format and all of Tiled’s features with a super-fast, multithreaded renderer and advanced features such as creating grid graphs for pathfinding, support for normal-mapped lighting of tilemaps, all necessary coordinate conversion methods and then some.
TilemapKit is free of artifacts, you can use multiple tilesets per tile layer, it plays tile animations, and can assign Tiled properties to any object via KVC.
There’s so much more to it, you should simply visit the features page from where you can also download the TilemapKit Trial.
Please post your questions and feedback on the TilemapKit forum and browse the roadmap, perhaps you’ll want to vote on one of the items or add your own.
Cocos2D “for iPhone” (as in: Objective-C) now has two forks:
- Cocos2D-ObjC maintained by Lars Birkemose. This fork builds on v3.4 with a focus on making Cocos2D easier to use for beginners. Its website is cocos2d-objc.org.
- Cocos2D-SpriteBuilder maintained by Scott Lembcke and others. This fork is currently at v3.4 also but will soon have a v4 release. Its website is spritebuilder.com.
How did this happen?
Scott’s thread explains it to some degree. There’s more info on the -ObjC thread. And the -ObjC mini roadmap provides some more insight.
Long story short: Lars and Scott disagree on the direction of Cocos2D. Lars continues with the version 3.4 of Cocos2D before any work on v4 has started. Naturally Cocos2D-SpriteBuilder will soon be the previously announced v4.
This happened shortly after Apportable stopped sponsoring the development of new Cocos2D/SpriteBuilder features. For Lars, Cocos2D was becoming this big chunk of support code for SpriteBuilder, and he’s now trying to turn the ship around.
